


The Playboy of Central New York

by blueorangecrush



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Graduate School, Incorrect Family Trees, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 03:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19432579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueorangecrush/pseuds/blueorangecrush
Summary: Tyler just wanted to be a semi-anonymous graduate student, not the funder of a biotech startup with his old money inheritance.He thought he'd meet a girl who didn't know or care about his money.  He was wrong about the "girl" part.





	The Playboy of Central New York

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lecavayay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lecavayay/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Lecavayay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lecavayay/pseuds/Lecavayay) in the [PuckingRare2019](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/PuckingRare2019) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Billionaire A has had a lot of crap relationships with people who only want his money or to be trophy wives/husbands. So one lonely night, A decides to answer an ad looking for a roommate in a modest apartment and live like the 99% for a while in hopes of finding someone to love him for him. 
> 
> Naturally, he has a delightful time with his roommate B and all the wonders of the broke post-doc life he shows him. He even thinks his experiment has worked, he's fallen in love (with B? with B's best friend C? Both?). His only worry is how to tell his One True Love(s) who he really is...
> 
> Happy endings only! Bolts/Rangers pairs/threesomes preferred. Please no Pens, Bruins, or Hawks.
> 
> \--
> 
> Disclaimer: I have no reason to believe Tyler Johnson has anything to do with the Johnsons of "Johnson & Johnson" fame, but it made a great hook for this prompt and I love these two so I ran with it.

It’s his…how do family trees work again? Third cousin, once removed, Tyler thinks, who made that movie, the documentary about all the poor little rich kids who didn’t know what to do with themselves.

It still seemed fitting that Tyler had been too little to be one of the poor little rich kids. Too young _and_ too small probably. Not the right…image. Not when another something-removed cousin owns a football team and Tyler has the constant reminder of how he wasn’t cut out for sports. Definitely not for football. He played hockey in prep school and college, wasn’t bad at it, and if he’d been three or four inches taller then maybe the NHL would’ve taken a look.

But he wasn’t.

It didn’t matter. Not really. It’s not like he needed the money – money was one thing he didn’t need. Cousin Jamie sure had that right.

He needed something to do with his life. He needed _someone_ in his life. 

There wasn’t a whole lot of the family left in the family business – and really, how could you tell, with a name as common as Johnson? But connections still meant something, and so did philanthropy, and he could “help” with some of the cutting-edge biotech spinoffs even if he didn’t really understand what was going on.

Trouble was, everyone else he met that way was the same kind of person – capital-providing owners for companies they only half-understood if that much, and a blur of people competing for the owners’ time and money and attention, whether business or personal.

Tyler needed to do something else. But what?

Well, he’d been a good student, and it might help if he could understand the industry he was in a little better, and he obviously had the money to pay full tuition so he didn’t need to worry about competing for a scholarship.

It could be more like undergrad - if he was at a big enough university, he could be just another unremarkable student with an unremarkable name, not a Johnson of the Johnson fortunes.

He thought about it for a while – considered locations and fields of study. Not an MBA. Probably didn’t have the lab science background to go with biotech. 

Public health?

He looked into a few schools, settled on Syracuse as the right combination of big school where nobody would know or care who he really was and city with a cost of living low enough that it wouldn’t just be obvious he had money coming from somewhere else.

\--

If part of the point of all this was to be one of the guys, he’d have to live more like one of the guys. Probably the best way to make that work was to answer a roommate ad, and he found one pretty quick that looked good, two other grad students in a three-bedroom duplex renting out the third room. Nice and ordinary.

Cory was a lot like Tyler, played some hockey in college, was a solid member of a solid team, but probably about three inches stood between him and going on to anything pro. He said the ECHL had come calling but it seemed like that would be a bad investment. Alex was taller, louder, friendlier, and very eager to sell Tyler on the place.

Not that it was that difficult. 

They were both economics grad students, done with their first year. Alex knew a guy in the public health program, though, and was happy to introduce Drej to Tyler. 

Tyler had just moved in and it already felt like he was getting what he came to Syracuse for.

\--

The hardest thing about Tyler’s new life was fighting the impulse to solve problems with money.

When Cory was chasing grant funding and fellowships and needed an upgrade to his interview suit, it was so hard for Tyler to fight the impulse to direct Cory to his own favorite designers. Cory couldn’t afford to spend two months of their rent, maybe more, on a suit.

Tyler ended up lending Cory one of his suits. “Just get it dry cleaned when you’re done.”

\--

No, actually, the hardest thing about Tyler’s new life was Drej. Tyler had thought that the reason he hadn’t wanted to find a girlfriend from his usual crowd, the reason he was going through the trouble of being an anonymous grad student instead of a biotech startup owner from an old money family, was because he couldn’t be sure any girl was interested in _him_ instead of in his money.

Maybe he’d been lying to himself all along, and been unfair to the girls. Maybe his lack of interest had been…for another reason.

Drej was everything Tyler had hoped for when he had hoped to meet someone. And that wasn’t supposed to be how this went.

Because Drej was a guy, and because Drej was an exchange visitor who was going to have to go back home to the Czech Republic when he was done with school, and because Drej was probably not going to be the kind of guy to be interested in another guy.

Because Drej was too good to be true.

\--

They went to one of the football tailgates. “When in America, do as Americans,” Drej said, laughing. 

They sat on a blanket and drank, and Tyler did the best he could to remind himself that the only reason they’re sitting so close is because it’s crowded, no matter how much every cell of his skin wants there to be another reason.

They got back to Tyler’s place to watch some ridiculous B movie about a plague and eat pizza, and they were still sitting closer than normal. Alex walked in halfway through the movie, made a pointed gagging face – he’s never been one for this kind of creepy stuff – and retreated to his own room, loudly slamming the door.

“Yeah, it’s gross, that’s the point,” Tyler laughed, shaking his head.

“Maybe the point isn’t the gross movie. Maybe it’s us. Too sweet.”

Tyler just looked at Drej, confused.

“Am I wrong?” Drej asked, sliding closer, moving his hand up Tyler’s arm.

“Not at all,” Tyler whispered, barely enough to be heard over the screams of the latest movie victim.

Was it still too good to be true if it was happening?

That was a worry for another time, Tyler decided.


End file.
